This blog was created for sharing knowledge for Microsoft Developers and Microsoft Certified Trainers about Office 365, Azure, SharePoint and .Net.

One more free ebook released by Microsoft. This new book is about Windows 10 for IT Pros. The book title is “Windows 10 IT Pro Essentials Support Secrets” by Ed Bott. Ed is an author of several books about Microsoft Technologies, including Office and Windows.

Hope you enjoy the book as much as I’m enjoying reading the first chapters!

Microsoft just announced the release of 3 new MCSA: SQL Server 2016 certifications. One big difference from these certifications from the previous versions is that now we have 3 MCSA instead of just the current MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014. Microsoft brought back the MCSA SQL Server Developer Certification. Being most a Developer that uses a lot SQL Server, this makes all the sense. So this is good news for all SQL Server Developers and standard developers that use SQL Server has their main Database system.

So, this are the new certifications:

MCSA: SQL 2016 Database Development

70-761 – Querying Data with Transact-SQL

70-762 – Developing SQL Databases

Note: If you already hold an MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014 certification can upgrade by taking and passing exam 70-762

MCSA: SQL 2016 Database Administration

70-764 – Administering a SQL Database Infrastructure

70-765 – Provisioning SQL Databases

Note: If you already hold an MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014 certification can upgrade by taking and passing exam 70-765

MCSA: SQL 2016 Business Intelligence Development

70-767 – Implementing a SQL Data Warehouse

70-768 – Developing SQL Data Models

Note: If you already hold an MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014 certification can upgrade by taking and passing exam 70-768

All MOC courses to prepare you for this SQL Server 2016 exams are already available. MCSE certifications will be announced later this summer.

Microsoft had renamed the dev/test offer. The name has changed from MSDN Dev Test Pay-As-You-Go to Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test. This offer is designer for all teams that need a Dev and/or Test Environment in the Cloud and not only Visual Studio users, like the previous name.

Why I’m writing this post just because of a name change?

Well because I see a lot of customers using standard subscriptions for their Dev and Test environments, when they could just use this type of subscription. Using this subscription customer get better rates and save some budget for other projects. In an IaaS scenario, and at the date of this post active Visual Studio subscribers, will only pay the Linux VM rate, because all the other software: Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, … is included in the Visual Studio Subscription.

“Each active Visual Studio subscriber on your team can use the Microsoft software included with their subscription on Azure Virtual Machines for dev/test at no extra charge—you’ll just pay the Linux rate for VMs you run, even VMs with SQL Server, SharePoint Server, or other software that is normally billed at a higher rate. Upload custom virtual machine images yourself or use one of our pre-configured images from the Azure Gallery.”

You will also can take the advantage of lower rates on Cloud Services, HDInsight, and Web Apps.

So, Microsoft has changed some naming on the upcoming Web Development platform.

ASP.NET 5 is now ASP.NET Core 1.0

.NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0

Entity Framework 7 is now Entity Framework Core 1.0

The justification for the new naming is that all this is technology is new and completely re-written. Another reason is that this is not yet finished, ASP.NET Core 1.0 doesn’t have SignalR or Web Pages and it doesn’t support VB.Net of F#.